The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con, Part II: Hope Kills

Just landed in San Diego. Comic-Con opens tonight — you can get into the show floor for a couple of hours for a kind of warm-up look-around deal.

It’s probably the best part of the entire show: a brief moment during which Comic-Con actually looks sort of like the show it should be. The halls are merely crowded, not actually packed and choking on nerd-flesh. There are dudes selling original comics art. There are dudes selling weird plush and plastic otaku artifacts from Japan.

(Last year at the show I bought my daughter this weird smiling caterpillar thing from Japan. She loves it and calls it Mee-moo. I don’t trust it. I swear that thing moves around at night.)

Hall H, the cavernous hellmouth in which the big studios screen their big movies, is shut.

But it won’t last. Soon Hall H will gape. The satanic mills will start turning. People will start standing in line for three hours so that large corporations can try to convince them that The Expendables is important and deserves a place in their lives. News outlets will start reporting this as if it is news. And the horror will begin again.

God knows I’m not complaining. I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the planet. It’s ridiculous that what I’m doing here is even a job.

But the really pathetic thing is, I haven’t even given up all hope. Every year I find myself getting fixated on something– a movie, show, comic, whatever — that smells authentic to me. I start to believe that something at Comic-Con will keep alive the spark of nerd genius amid all this junk.

Last year it was Kick-Ass. This year I find myself looking at two movies.

One is Machete, the Robert Rodriguez hack-em-up starring that guy who plays the tough Mexican dude in every action movie ever made. The other is Scott Pilgrim, based on the brilliant graphic novels, and directed by the guy who made Shaun of the Dead.How could it go wrong?